What is the best way to educate internal stakeholders on Account Based Marketing in order to accurately highlight the potential benefits to the organization as a whole and to their individual teams’ functions?

This question has a lot to unpack. Influencing change takes a LOT of time, but I would recommend starting with first principles. 3 things I would start with: I gotta say marketing sure did a good job of marketing ourselves! However, “ABM” is not a marketing thing; it’s a holistic revenue strategy. The first thing I usually do is internally rebrand “Accunt-Based Marketing” to be a target account strategy. “Seek first to understand.” That will mean building relationships cross-functionally to esta ...Read More

Great Question! Here are a few to consider and why: Sales Why: The sales team has direct insights into customer needs, pain points, and buying behaviors. They can provide valuable input on target accounts and help align sales and marketing efforts. Role: Identify high-value accounts, provide feedback on messaging, and collaborate on account-specific strategies. Marketing Why: The marketing team is responsible for developing and executing the ABM strategy. They bring expertise in content creation ...Read More

Go to market as ONE team with your sales counterpart. Ensure the accounts you are targeting is 100% aligned with sales strategy. Your sales team is going to change courses during the quarter/mid-year; pivot with them and ensure you are always aligning to their top priority accounts. Educate your organization by highlighting the impact that ABM will have to the business. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation. How are we help ...Read More

I treat my internal stakeholders the same as I do any customer. I seek to understand what matters to them, what jobs to be done they have, and then I position my proposals to ensure I address those. For the most part when you need a teams support in any kind of marketing it's because they also have a vested interest in the result. As an example. If the team is going after a very specific set of accounts and needs the PMM org to provide some content specific to that segment I ask my team to first ...Read More

Host a lunch and learn. Give people free lunch or a snack or something to attend. Then tell a story. Don't present facts and figures. If you're new to storytelling, try using ChatGPT or Bard. Here's a sample prompt: "Using the classic story structure, write me an outline to explain why account based marketing is a strategic benefit to a B2B company. Give me an explanation, with no fluff or extra words, for each of the seven main parts of the story including the exposition, rising action, climax, ...Read More

Account-based marketing (ABM) is not intended to be used solely by one department. It is a cross-functional company strategy with heavy influence from sales. Here are a few examples of how to gain buy-in: Create an ABM playbook that consolidates the feedback of collaborators, including sales, marketing, revenue operations, customer success, and other stakeholders. Host a lunch and learn session and walk through the playbook. Answer questions and take the time to clearly articulate the value and ...Read More